Financial skills

Having the skills and confidence to manage your money is a necessary foundation to staying out of debt. Our Foresight work has highlighted the importance of financial literacy as a key emerging and future need.

Social housing tenancies can be one way to help people take charge of their finances. But more support is needed.

Difficulties

Managing finances can be particularly difficult for:

people moving in and out of work

young people

first time tenants.

Spiralling debts and falling into arrears can lead to lost tenancies and the loss of financial stability that comes from them.

Support

To help people manage their finances, we’re supporting social housing tenants through our Improving Financial Confidence programme. We’re making sure they have the knowledge and support to make good financial decisions. This will help them avoid falling further into debt.

Supporting social housing tenants will also help social housing landlords. By ensuring tenants have the skills to manage their money, landlords will face fewer arrears. Both groups will also then face fewer evictions.

We want to make sure that this work is effective. That’s why we’re evaluating the programme. It helps us find out which approaches work best to support social housing tenants. We can use what we learn to make sure future programmes bring the most benefit.

The results from the research will be available on this page in due course.

More about the research

We’ve invested £31.7 million across England in our Improving Financial Confidence initiative. Through it, we fund projects to help people increase their confidence in managing their money.

We focus on social housing tenants who are most likely to be financially excluded. To reach them, our projects work with social housing tenants to provide advice and support to tenants.

Ecorys and the Personal Finance Research Centre are evaluating the Improving Financial Confidence initiative for us. This work will help us to identify which approaches work best to support social housing tenants.